Business in Brief

The Interior Department dropped an oil-lease sale.

Reason for the cancellation was because nobody seemed interested enough to bid, the department said. The area in question, in the North Atlantic off New England, was to have been offered along with other tracts in early September but was deleted because of a boundary dispute with Canada. Most of the geologically promising formations were awarded to Canada by a World Court decision in October. The area covered about 4.5 million acres, of which Canada got 80%.